People no longer use domains. I've seen tons of people go to Google search and put "domain.com" there. With mobile, domains are even less useful. I think people still have ".com" in their mind and for sure "somethingapp.com" is easier to communicate than the future "something.app". It confuses people, they are used to ".com". It's like ".mobi" and ".tel", which were supposed to be killers. Yet, most companies just implemented "m.something.com" instead of ".mobi". These cryptic names only get hacker kudos, mere mortals don't really care and for most of those, you need to pay a premium and be stuck with a crappy registrar. Gandi is pretty good though and I hear much more hacker-friendly with not paying so much attention on take down notices like with the US registrars.
HDF is cool, no doubt; but I have mixed feelings about using some of these TLDs for important projects. I simply haven't decided how much to trust these small registries.<p>Awhile back I bought tra.gd when I thought I needed a short domain for something. If someone were to build a brand around a .gd domain, could Grenada change their rules to disallow international commercial usage? A more popular ccTLD example is .io.
Always wanted to get al.ec, but it's apparently too short (when I've Googled it). I'd also like .ks to be a TLD so I can by soc.ks (I'm a huge socks fan).
I bought dg.gs ages ago. (dg is my initials.) It's handy for super-short email addresses when you have to type one into a touch screen credit card terminal like square.